Re: cross-debugging of userland core files, nat -> tdep

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@mvista.com>]

On Wed, Apr 10, 2002 at 06:39:18PM -0700, Jason R Thorpe wrote:
> Hi folks...
> 
> I've been thinking of what needs to happen in order to support
> cross-debugging of userland core files in NetBSD.
> 
> BFD can already handle NetBSD ELF core files in the appropriate way.  As
> far as I can tell, the only stumbling block is getting GDB to play nicely
> with them.
> 
> The problem is that the functions that supply registers, etc. from the core
> file are all in "nat" modules.  This is probably mostly an artifact of the
> data being in the same format as the reg structure returned by ptrace(2).
> 
> What I'd like to do is move those supply-registers routines into an
> appropriate "tdep" file.  They can still be used by the "nat" routines
> which use ptrace(2), and all the core file handling goo can then go into
> the "tdep" module, as well.
> 
> If this sounds reasonable, then I'll start my little project.  Otherwise,
> I'd love to hear suggestions :-)

Hit the nail on the head.  I believe I've gotten BFD to understand ELF
core files appropriately for a fair number of targets; you may need to
add a platform-specific chunk to all the ones I didn't get to.  Then
move supply_* out of the nat files, and link in the core code.

Now, if you've got time, there's a much better way to do this.  The
"magic" supply_* and fetch_* names need to go; we should instead have a
table of regset types, sizes, and fetch/supply functions.  I just
haven't gotten around to actually doing that.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz                           Carnegie Mellon University
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer